In the grand tradition of all digital marketing blogs, let me start by giving you an offline scenario that we can all relate to “IRL”: you pass a billboard in the street which is advertising the perfect gift for your partner. The billboard tells you everything you need to know about the product and you decide to buy it right there and then. You arrive at the only shop in town selling the item to find it half-boarded up, with broken windows and a missing sign. Worse still, there is a suspicious character hanging around outside eyeing you up and down. Even if the perfect gift is inside that shop, what do you do? You turn around and look for something else.

Your paid search marketing campaign could well be that billboard we saw – informative, memorable, relatable and with a great call to action. But the formatting of your landing page is slightly off on mobile devices, there are spelling mistakes in the headings and you have a non-secure submissions form triggering alerts in the user’s browser. You might as well be stood outside that store in a rough part of town.

First Impressions Matter More Than Ever

Landing Pages are crucial to any digital marketing campaign. They are the first real opportunity you have to introduce your business, or the products you sell. A great landing page can cause a user to convert on their first visit, whilst a poor one can leave a lasting negative impression that’s hard to come back from – 79% of dissatisfied customers won’t visit your site again. Pushy sales language, irrelevant content and pressuring your visitors into submitting personal information such as email addresses can be enough to drive your traffic away for good.

Landing Pages Affects PPC Quality Score

Poor landing pages can also have a direct effect on the success of your paid search campaigns. Each PPC keyword you bid on in Adwords is assigned a Quality Score out of 10. While there are many, many factors that are taken into account by the Google Algorithm, effectively quality score is a rating of your keywords relevancy to a user’s search term and the landing page you direct them towards.

If a user searches for shoes, but your advert takes them to a landing page about coats, they’re unlikely to convert. Not only are you going to see a lower ROI in this scenario, but Google will eventually realise that your landing page has little relevancy to the keywords you bid on and punish you by lowering your Quality Score: there’s lots of evidence to suggest that lower quality score means a higher £/click and a lower Ad Position in the search engine results pages.

What makes a Great Landing Page?

Simply put, when a user arrives on a landing page after clicking your link, it should be immediately clear they have arrived in the right place. All the information that they need to make their decision should be freely available to them in a friendly, clear and concise way with a powerful CTA. A great landing page will be technically sound too – fully mobile responsive, formatted correctly and with a clear focus on security.

In the age of the internet, people want instant gratification – and if your landing page doesn’t immediately offer a user the information they are looking for, then you have already lost their interest. Remember – without the perfect landing page your customers aren’t going to care about what you have for sale, they’re just not going to get past the state of your shop front. As the old saying goes: first impressions really do matter on the internet.